XL ARTS

Ensemble brought tango to the clubs

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
AMERICAN-STATESMAN ARTS WRITER
Thursday, April 09, 2009

Tango. Perhaps it's the original alt-classical music. Perhaps, in fact, tango ensembles were the original bar bands.

Long before today's adventurous classically trained musicians started busting down barriers by taking their music out of the concert hall and into the nightclub, tango orchestras were playing for dancers in racy clubs in Argentina and Uruguay as early as the 1890s. By the 1910s and 1920s, tango cleaned up a bit when it became a popular dance fad in Europe and the United States. But still, there were those tango orchestras. After all, what hand-crank gramophone could be heard across a crowded dance floor?

Here in Austin, the tango bug bit about a decade ago, right along with a general resurgence in the sultry, complicated dance that was rolling across the country. But unlike most other places where tango percolated, Austin had its own tango house band right from the get-go.

A veteran member of many bands, Glover Gill culled together a group of string players he knew from his music school days at the University of Texas to form a tango string ensemble that played for the growing dance scene. By 1996, Gill and his cohorts became the seven-member Tosca Tango Orchestra and had a regular weekly gig at the now-defunct Ritz on Sixth Street.

Wait — beer-drinking, cigarette-smoking violinists, cellists and pianists in a bar? Sure.

"Well, all of us had always been hanging out in bars," Gill deadpans. "So we really didn't think much of playing our music in a bar."

Neither did the tango dancers. And soon a much wider crowd began to catch the tango music fever. The minor-chord melodies, the edgy rhythms, the complex, melodramatic mood — tango struck a chord in Austin.

Gill and Tosca recorded six CDs together and he wrote the tango-fused score for Richard Linklater's 2001 film, "Waking Life" which gave plenty of screen time to Tosca. And Gill composed a suite for Ballet Austin's 2003 "Touch," a tango ballet.

For their part, the four women who now make up what's known as the Tosca String Quartet — Ames Asbell, Leigh Mahoney Sara Nelson and Tracy Seeger — have traveled far, touring internationally with David Byrne and featured on his "Grown Backwards" CD, and landing positions in the Austin Symphony Orchestra and the Austin Lyric Opera orchestra.

But the tango pull is never far. And recently Gill and the Tosca women have once again begun a monthly gig at Esquina Tango, an East Austin cultural organization. Don't dance the tango? Come and listen anyway.

"(Tango) is great bar music," Gill says.

jvanryzin@statesman.com; 445-3699

Glover Gill and the Tosca String Quartet

When: 10:30 p.m. Saturday (Beginning tango dance lesson at 9 p.m.)

Where: Esquina Tango, 209 Pedernales St.

Cost: $10 (includes dance class)

Information: 524-2772, www.esquinatangoaustin.com